10 Phenomenon : Science can’t Explain

Have you ever heard of something that is unexplained? There are a lot of bizarre things in the world such as animals raining from the sky, or weird unexplained heat anomalies found inside the Great Pyramids of Giza. Sometimes the answer is found and sometimes these things remain a mystery that science cannot explain.

Check out these 10 natural phenomena that science can’t explain.

Mammatus clouds

Mammatus clouds

Mammatus clouds which mean mammary cloud is a cellular pattern of pouches hanging underneath the base of a cloud. These are typically heavy cumulonimbus rain clouds. Mammatus are most often associated with severe weather and they can appear before or after a storm, they can indicate a strong storm and storms that cause tornadoes, they are usually composed of ice but nobody knows exactly how mammatus clouds are formed.

Scientists have been studying the formation of these clouds, but still, have no idea why they form in the shape they do.

Heat Anomaly

Heat Anomaly

Heat Anomaly found in the Great Pyramid of Giza. Scientists have been studying the Great Pyramid of Giza, which is the oldest of the seven wonders of the ancient world and have found strange heat signatures that have no explanation. Thermal scanning of the monuments has found that some of the limestone blocks were hotter than others. The heat anomaly was discovered on the eastern side of the Khufu pyramid at ground level, however, no explanation is provided for the heat anomalies which could possibly imply the presence of a hidden chamber inside Khufu’s pyramid. Only time will tell what is causing this, that is, if someone dares enter the chamber.

Oakville Blobs

Oakville Blobs

Oakville Blobs, on August 7th, 1994 during a rainstorm blob of a translucent, gelatinous substance fell in the town of Oakville, Washington. Various efforts were produced to identify the blobs. Then doctors found something startling, the blobs contained human white blood cells. Several theories cropped up at the time to explain the visual aspect of the blobs though none have been established. One of the most popular theories was the so-called jellyfish theory, which said that the blobs could be the result of swarms of jellyfish being blown to bits by the ocean bombing runs, which were then distributed into a rain cloud. The uncanny thing is that several residents of Oakville became violently ill after the unusual rainstorm and a large number of cats and dogs who came in direct touch with the substance became ill and passed away.

Lake Hillier

Lake Hillier

Lake Hillier, Australia is the abode of the unusual pink lakes, Lake Hillier is one of them located on the Middle Island, this body of water is famous for its remarkable bubblegum pink color. 600 meters long and surrounded by a rim of sand and thick woods of eucalyptus trees, this pink lake still surprises and intrigued scientists. The vibrant color is lasting and does not change when the water is contained in a container. No one really knows for sure why the lake is pink, researchers can only speculate that a dye created by bacteria that live in the salt crusts are responsible for the beautiful color, whatever, the cause the water does not appear to pose any danger to humans.

Socotra Island, Yemen

Socotra Island, Yemen

Socotra Island, Yemen feels like you’re visiting another planet. Socotra island off the coast of Yemen has been called the most alien-looking place on earth and a lost world because of the heat and drought. Conditions on the island have produced around 800 rare species of flora and fauna and 1/3 of those can’t be seen anywhere else on the planet. One of the most striking of Socotra plants is the dragon’s blood tree which is a strange looking umbrella shape tree. The trees and plants on the island have evolved to suit its hostile climate and some forms of the plant are a staggering 20 million years old.

Kelimutu, Indonesia

Kelimutu, Indonesia

Mount Kelimutu is a volcano in Flores Indonesia. The mountain has three volcanic crater lakes that vary colors from each other at different times, making them surreal and exciting to be discovered. These lakes change color dramatically and unpredictably from blue or green to crimson or black making it one of the natural phenomena to be beheld by many. People believe that particular minerals in the water may interact with a volcanic gas to create the mercurial shades, but it’s hard to know for sure. Scientists have been unable to explain how the volcanic crater lakes change their colors.

Brain injury turns men into a math genius

Brain injury turns men into a math genius

After being brutally attacked in 2002 Jason Padgett now sees the world through a geometric lens. His devastating injury seems to have unlocked part of his mind that creates everything in his world appear to possess a mathematical construction. Other people have developed remarkable music or artistic abilities, but few people have acquired mathematical faculties like Padgett. Padgett is one of only 40 people in the world with the acquired savant syndrome. The findings suggest such skills may lie dormant in all human brains the truth is we know very little about our own brains.

Stonehenge

Stonehenge

For centuries, historians and archaeologists have puzzled over Stonehenge, which took Neolithic builders around 1,500 years to build. It is situated in southern England and it is comprised of roughly 100 massive upright stones placed in a circular layout. Archeologists think that the prehistoric ruin was built in multiple stages with the earliest construction 5,000 years ago or before that. Research says that the site has continuously evolved over a period of about 10,000 years. The biggest of stone henges stones are up to 30 feet or 9 meters tall and weighed 25 tons, about 22.6 metric tons on average. It is believed that they were brought from a distance of 20 miles or 32 kilometers to the north. It’s unknown how these builders move the stones that far without the help of modern technology. There are also a lot of theories about the purpose of Stonehenge. One of them suggests that the cluster of megalithic stones is an astronomical calendar, but no one knows for sure.

Animal Rain Phenomenon

Animal Rain Phenomenon

The origins of this bizarre animal rain phenomenon have evolved throughout history. The first reported phenomenon occurred in the 1st century AD when Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder documented fish and frogs raining from the sky. One of the most well-known examples of this rain phenomenon took place in Louisiana in 1947, when the fish started to rain from the sky averaging one fish per square yard. This frightening rain phenomenon also has extended to even more alarming creatures raining from the sky such as worms and snakes. No one knows for sure how the clouds become filled with small animals which end up raining down in different parts of the world. Some suggest that sudden gusts of winds tornadoes and waterspouts suck these animals into the air. That sounds a little far-fetched and really no one knows why this happens.

Tsingy de Bemaraha, Madagascar

Tsingy de Bemaraha, Madagascar

The Tsingy de Bemaraha is a national park located in the Mellah key region northwest Madagascar. The site is unique with its biodiversity an exceptional landscape called the Tsingy, which can be translated into, “where one cannot walk barefoot”. It’s a strange name but the reason it’s called, this is because the Tsingy appears as crevices and surfaces of limestone blocks carved in blades or sharp needles. These limestone rocks formed by a deposit of fossils and shells under the sea 200 million years ago and it’s thought that rain our groundwater cut the sharp rocks into their shape, but no one knows for sure as there is no other place like this on earth.

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Do you Dream? Why? – Explained

While we sleep at night, most of us see dreams. Some which we like and somewhat we do not. But do you know why you see dreams? We will tell you today why you see dreams. Without wasting your time, let us start. Why do we dream? What’s going on inside our brains?

The scientific study of dreaming is called oneirology. And for most of history, it didn’t really exist, because you can’t hold a dream. It’s difficult to measure a dream, you can’t taste it. You can’t see other people’s dreams, and if you ask them to tell you what they dreamt, the results are almost always unreliable. In fact, it’s estimated that we forget 95 percent of the dreams we have, especially within the first ten minutes of having them.

But then, in 1952, something amazing happened. Researchers at the University of Chicago found something new. It’s a unique type of electrical activity that occurs during a certain stage of a person sleeping. When researchers awoke people during this stage, they almost always reported that they had been dreaming. Also, at the same time, during this stage, people’s eyeballs are going crazy, rapidly darting all over the place underneath their eyelids. You can actually see this happening if you watch people sleep. This Rapid Eye Moment is the reason why it is called REM Sleep.

Imaging of Electric Impulse

During REM sleep, some pretty bizarre stuff happens. If you look at the electrical activity of a brain that is in REM sleep, it almost exactly mimics the way the brain acts when it’s awake. It is also call “paradox sleep” The biggest difference being that the production of chemicals inside the brain like norepinephrine, serotonin, and histamine is almost completely blocked, and that causes the muscles to stop moving, which is why you can dream about flying or running around or fighting ninjas, but your body doesn’t move.

People who have a disorder achieving complete REM atopia move around in their sleep and act out their dreams. They can even get out of bed and sleepwalk. Oh, before we move forward, I should say two things.

One is that it’s possible to wake up and not be able to move your body because you’re still in REM atopia. You’re completely conscious and you know that you’re awake, but your body is not ready to move. On the flip side, you can also be inside a dream and know that you’re dreaming. This phenomenon is known as lucid dreaming, and it’s particularly attractive because while in an elusive dream, I can make conscious decisions about what I do. I can go fly to wherever I want, or I can have a tea party with Abraham Lincoln. I’m in control, but achieving an elusive dream is quite elusive.

Researchers were able to deprive mice of REM sleep by using a small cup inverted inside a tub of water, way up to the tippy top, meaning that the mouse was only able to sit right on top of this little tiny surface. When that happens, the mouse can still fall into non-REM sleep, but as soon as they reach REM sleep and their muscles relax, they fall off the platform into the water waking up.

What they found was that when mice are not allowed to achieve REM sleep, they have an incredible amount of trouble remembering things. This happens in humans too. If you have people remember word pairs and then you don’t allow them to sleep, the next day, their memory for that stuff is incredibly terrible.

But memory and REM does not stop there. If a person learns a difficult new task during the day, say a new instrument or a new type of difficult puzzle, you can measure the electrical activity in their brain while they do that, and then while they sleep that night, whether they know it or not, their brain replays those electronic impulses.

Many popular theories about why we dream are variations on the idea that while we sleep, the unconscious part of our brain is busy organizing memories and strengthening connections from the day before that we need in the future while getting rid of the junk that would otherwise clog the brain.

Now, so the theory goes, these electrical impulses are detected by our conscious brain, and our cortex freaks out.

It doesn’t know what it means, and so it tries its best to create a cohesive story, creating a dream. This would explain why dreams are often so fantastic and seemingly random. They’re not supposed to make sense, they’re not an actual message from our brain. It’s just the results of our cortexes trying to synthesize the noise coming from all the work being done back in the unconsciousness. Under this way of thinking, dreams are an epiphenomenon. They’re not a primary process that has a purpose. Instead, they’re the accidental result of a more important process going on behind the conscious brain.

Fantasy Stories of Dream

But some researchers don’t believe that. They believe the dreams serve a primary purpose, and that purpose is to prepare us for threats. They think this because the most prevalent emotions felt during dreams are negative. Abandonment, anger, and the most common of all, anxiety. The theory goes like this: back when we were early humans especially, we had no idea what kind of threats we might encounter during the day. And so, to prepare us, our brain would simulate anxieties while we slept to make us better prepared for that feeling in the real world. So people who had terrifying dreams were better at dealing with anxiety in the real world and had stronger genes. All right, so the theories we discussed today are quite popular, but they don’t really enjoy a consensus. Not everyone agrees with them, and they barely scratch the surface of scientific thought about dreams. But that’s kind of the cool thing about dreams.

Hope you have a good idea about your dreams now. Do share your dreams in the comment section below and also provide your valuable feedback. Also, subscribe to the newsletter or allow the notification to get updates of our presence whenever a new article is posted.

What is a Dyson Sphere? Should we Build it?

The idea of Dyson spheres has captured our imaginations. Vast megastructures, capable of harvesting the power the output of entire stars, the as yet inexplicable Kepler Space Telescope observation of swarms of somethings partially eclipsing a distant star has led to some rampant speculation.

Kepler Space Telescope

Today we ask, are Dyson spheres plausible? And are they inevitable?

In 1960, astrophysicist Freeman Dyson proposed that a sufficiently advanced civilization would have such extreme real estate and energy requirements that they might build artificial habitats in the form of vast shells surrounding their parent star. Such Dyson spheres would be possible targets for our search for extraterrestrial intelligence, appearing only as strange points of infrared lights but otherwise black at visible wavelengths.

We don’t really know how the energy requirements of advanced civilizations evolve. It may be that their most natural progression does not require cosmic levels of consumption. On the other hand, securing access to an entire star’s energy output officially elevates a civilization to type 2 on the Kardashev scale. We’re currently type 0. So obviously it would be nice to unlock the achievement.

Let’s assume that access to 10 to the power of 26 watts is desirable. Are Dyson spheres the way to go? The plausibility of a solid sphere the size of a planetary orbit is not really in question. They are not plausible. The incredible stresses on a solar structure that size is vastly greater than could be sustained by any known or yet imagined material. Even if a super advanced material with enough strength was discovered, you’d need impossibly large quantities, much more than there is non-hydrogen or helium matter in all of the planets in the solar system. The sphere would not be habitable, having only a tiny gravitational pull at its surface, and that would be towards the sun. And finally, it would be hopelessly unstable. Any small bump would cause one side to fall into the sun. Some of these issues could be dealt with. But in the end, it’s just not an efficient way to start your galactic empire.

Kardashev scale

So do we ditch Dyson’s original idea in our quest to reach type 2? Not so fast. It’s not feasible to build a giant solar sphere. But collecting the entire output of our home star may still be the smart choice. In fact, we can get around all of the issues I just described with a simple adjustment. Instead of building a Dyson sphere, build a Dyson swarm, individual solar collectors that are only kilometers or less in diameter and each with its own independent stable orbit around the sun. Build enough of these, and you can read the entire sun in all directions, absorbing its entire energy output.

The crazy thing about the Dyson swarm is that we could probably start building one in the not too distant future. In fact, we could get started on the first collector pretty much right away. The thing that makes it seem a crazy prospect is a sheer scope. We’d have to disassemble entire planets for the raw materials alone. But believe it or not, there is a plan. It was proposed by Stuart Armstrong, AI expert and futurist. The idea is to cannibalize the planet Mercury. And that’s just to begin the swarm.

Dyson swarm

Mercury is ideal because it has a gigantic solid iron core, comprising over 40% of the planet’s mass. Combine that with the abundant oxygen in its crust, and we can make hematite, a naturally occurring, highly reflective iron oxide that has been used for millennia as primitive mirrors. So each of the swarms collectors would then be a giant polished hematite mirror, perhaps a kilometer across, but as thin as tinfoil. It would reflect light into a small solar power plant that would then beam energy somewhere useful, perhaps with a laser or a maser.

The other nice thing about Mercury is that its gravity is low enough that launching mined raw material into space for construction is pretty efficient. Building the first collector would be the slowest. We start with limited mining, space launch, and orbital construction facilities, all of it autonomous.

Energy supply is the big limiting factor at the start, so it takes about 10 years to build the first collector. But once it’s complete, we have orders of magnitude more available power. We use it to power replicator robots, building new mining and manufacturing facilities, as well as replaceable replicators. It’s an exponential process. Every new collector increases the energy available to build more collectors. Within 70 years, we have a partial Dyson swarm, and Mercury is nothing more than a debris field. To fully encompass the sun, we’d probably need to devour Venus, Mars, and a good number of asteroids and outer solar system moons, too, assuming we want to leave Earth intact. Let’s assume that. Sound over the top? It’s totally nuts. But it’s likely doable.

Venus, Mars

Autonomy in manufacturing, mining, and transportation are all progressing exponentially. Engineers are in the serious planning phases for all sorts of space-based assembly projects, including 3D printing of giant telescope mirrors. Real companies are gearing up to do autonomous asteroid mining, perhaps within a couple of decades. And all of this is without considering nanorobotics, which could change the game entirely. Frankly, there’s no obvious deal breaker here. Once complete, the Dyson swarm would harvest a good fraction of the sun’s energy, so trillions of times the current energy output of the planet. What we then do with that energy is another matter.

But is the Dyson swarm really the best path to type 2 status? Would other civilizations have gone that route, casting very conspicuous shadows on their home stars for us to detect? The advantage of using sunlight is that the sun is already making it. However, in terms of power efficiency, it’s not all that great. Only 0.7% of the rest mass of the ongoing hydrogen fuel at the sun’s core is converted to energy. Also, we need a megastructure to harvest it, with a raw material requirement close to that of all the terrestrial planets in the solar system. Is there a better way? Maybe.

What if instead of converting 0.7% of fuel rest mass into energy we could achieve 100% efficiency? Anti-matter engines do this. But currently, it takes more energy to create the anti-matter fuel than we get back out. Perhaps we can do better there, but there are also other options, for example, black hole engines. Energy can be harvested from a black hole, either from the Hawking radiation, from heat generated from an infalling material, or by extracting angular momentum from the black hole’s spin. We talked about one example, the Kugelblitz. Tapping the Hawking radiation from an artificial black hole is appealing because once formed, we could perhaps sustain it from evaporation by feeding it with new matter. This is really 100% efficient conversion of mass into energy, assuming we can find a way to pump new matter into the proton-sized Kugelblitz against the tide of Hawking radiation. And we only need 1 billion Kugelblitzes to equal the sun’s output. That’s nothing, compared to the hundreds of quadrillion solar collectors in a full Dyson swarm.

Kugelblitz

Added benefits. We get to keep Venus and Mars. And also Kugelblitz and other 100% efficient mass converters are indefinitely scalable. The Dyson sphere/swarm can absorb at most the entire energy output of the sun. However, there’s enough mass in the solar system to run a type 3 civilization’s Kugelblitz swarm for many times the current age of the universe. Of course, the trick is making the black holes in the first place. To make an industry standard, 600 million kilogram Kugelblitz, it takes something like 10% of the sun’s energy output each second, focused into a single attometer at a single instant. But wait. That’s the power we get from even a partial Dyson swarm. So there’s something to do with the swarm’s energy.

Burn through Mercury. Then use that partial Dyson swarm’s energy to build Kugelblitzes, in orbit, say, around Jupiter. Type 3, here we come. Maybe this is why we don’t see Dyson swarms all through the galaxy. Aliens build partial swarms to provide the energy to build more efficient engines, which would be essentially undetectable. Or they try building their first Kugelblitz, and it goes very, very badly. Either way, Fermi paradox solved. Admittedly, the fading that the Kepler Space Telescope observed in Tabby’s star is sort of consistent with a partial swarm. I guess it couldn’t hurt to point some radio telescopes, to look for power leakage from the Kugelblitz swarm. But no. It’s never aliens unless every other explanation is exhausted.

Source: Space Time

The Most Mysterious Star in the Universe – KIC

Mysterious Star (KIC)

There are countless stars in the universe. There may be around one hundred billion stars just in our Milky Way galaxy alone. But the single strangest one that we’ve discovered so far is a pretty close one to home, known officially as KIC 8462852, it’s only a little larger than the Sun is, and is only located about 1280 light-years away from us. It’s been known to humanity for quite some time, but always remained relatively obscure until recent observations noticed something strange back in 2015.

It seemed like KIC 8462852 was getting dimmer, and nobody really understood why. Researchers became aware in 2015 that back in March of 2011, recordings made by the Kepler space telescope indicated that the star’s brightness was reduced by up to 15%, and by February 2013, it’s brightness had been reduced by up to 22%. The star continued to dim and brighten again, which suggested that something enormous was orbiting around it. For comparison, a planet the size of Jupiter would only obscure the star by just 1%.

This indicated that whatever was blocking the light from the star wasn’t a planet, but something way bigger, covering up to half of the entire width of the star. In addition to these day-long dimming and brightenings, a study of a century’s worth of photographic plates dating between 1890 and 1998 suggested that the star’s brightness had gradually faded by 20% in that time, an amount unprecedented by any other known star of this size and type.

Speculation began to run rampant about what was causing the star to fade, And one of the more interesting theories was that we were witnessing the construction of a giant alien mega-structure called a Dyson sphere. In a paper written back in 1960 by Freeman Dyson titled, “Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation” Dyson suggested that any other technological civilization in the universe would likely follow a similar power consumption pattern to that of humans.

Dyson sphere

Since humanity’s energy needs have been continuously growing year by year, It’s possible that eventually, we’ll need more energy than what we can produce on earth, so, the logical end step for maximum energy harvesting is to harvest it directly from the Sun from one of three different types of Dyson spheres.

Type one is to build a ring of orbiting structures around the star that collect light and wirelessly transfer the energy back to the home planet.

Type two is to build a bubble of satellites around the star that absorbs a good percentage of the light, but not all of it.

Type three is to completely swallow the star with a solid shell of matter that absorbs 100% of the energy and light that the star produces. If a sphere like this was built around the Sun with a radius of one au, the spheres surface area would be 550 million times the surface area of Earth, and it would produce a ridiculous 384.6 Yottawatts of energy, about 33 trillion times the entire energy consumption of all of humanity in 1998

Access to such an enormous amount of energy would essentially make any civilization that harnessed it appear to us to be as powerful as Gods. We don’t know what exactly would be possible; it would kind of be like showing paleolithic people what a nuclear reactor would be capable of doing.

Freeman Dyson

Freeman Dyson speculated that any civilization in space that got advanced enough would eventually build one of these types of structures, which meant that in theory, we could detect their presence by observing a massive dip in light, sort of like what was happening with KIC 8462852.

However, Dyson also believes that most known substances that would make up a Dyson Sphere would be re-radiating energy in the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum, which was not being detected with our mysterious star. In 2016, the lead researcher into the light irregularities of the star said in a now-famous TED talk that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and it is my job, my responsibility, as an astronomer to remind people that alien hypotheses should always be a last resort.

To further add to the mystery though, the SETI Institute concluded that whatever material is blocking the light between us and the star is located inside the star’s habitable zone, where life like ours would be possible. The craziest theory is that we may be currently observing a gigantic interplanetary space battle that included the apocalyptic destruction of a planet that generated dust obscuring the light from the star.

Seriously, all natural explanations were turning up weak, until a recent study was concluded just last month in January 2018. More than 1,700 people donated over $100,000 to fund the study, which concluded that the most likely culprit blocking the star’s light was just dust. The data showed that different colors of light were being blocked at different intensities, which meant that whatever is passing between us and the star isn’t opaque, which is what would be expected from either a planet or an alien mega-structure. If it is dust though, it’s still not entirely clear why that much would be in the system though in the first place.

Considering that it doesn’t appear to be a young star system, dust should have coalesced into a series of planets by now, which is yet another part of the puzzle surrounding KIC 8462852. There is still work that needs to be done in finding answers out about this star. We still can’t say for certain what exactly is going on.

So that’s all about the mysterious Star. Do mention your views in the comment section below. And also allow the notification by pressing the bell icon you see in the lower corner to get notification of all our latest article. Also, subscribe to the newsletter if you liked our work.